Brooklyn and Reshus Harabim

The question of an eruv in Brooklyn cannot be reduced to whether one particular avenue carries an extraordinary number of people. In the responsa of Rav Moshe Feinstein, Brooklyn is treated as a large, densely populated city whose streets, neighborhoods, population, and public movement have to be considered together. Flatbush and Boro Park are discussed by name, but not as isolated towns detached from the rest of Brooklyn. Crown Heights is likewise part of the same Brooklyn setting.

This matters because one of the central questions in urban eruvin is whether the area contains a reshus harabim min haTorah. A tzuras hapesach can be effective for many areas that are not a Torah-level public domain. It does not by itself solve the problem of a full reshus harabim according to the rulings at issue here. Rav Moshe therefore spent considerable space defining what population and public use mean in a city such as Brooklyn before turning to the proposed neighborhood eruvin.

Brooklyn was not treated as a collection of unrelated neighborhoods

In Igros Moshe, Orach Chaim IV:87, Rav Moshe begins from the model of the encampment in the Midbar. He distinguishes between a road, where the question may be how many people pass along that road, and a city, where the people found throughout the streets of the city can together establish the public character of the area.

Applying that to Brooklyn, he writes that Brooklyn is "one city filled with population." He then uses Flatbush as his example. If Flatbush extends together with Brooklyn through the relevant area, the inquiry is not confined to a municipal or conversational neighborhood line. The question is how many people are found throughout the streets of the area being measured.

His discussion therefore has two levels. Brooklyn can be considered as one urban whole, and a sufficiently large and populated part of Brooklyn can also have the status of reshus harabim on its own. In Orach Chaim V:28, when answering arguments made for the Flatbush and Boro Park eruvin, he states this second point explicitly:

But Brooklyn, every significant section, such as Flatbush and Boro Park and the like, is a reshus harabim in its own right, since in each one, within an area even smaller than twelve mil by twelve mil, there are six hundred thousand.

That sentence states Rav Moshe's factual and halachic conclusion in that responsum. It should not be confused with the much simpler proposition that any neighborhood whose census population exceeds 600,000 is automatically a reshus harabim. His calculation was about the Midbar model, the relevant area, the people found in the streets, and the way a dense city functions.

Population was part of the analysis, not a substitute for it

Brooklyn's resident population was plainly enormous during the period of these responsa. According to the U.S. Census figures compiled by the New York City Department of City Planning, Brooklyn had 2,602,012 residents in 1970 and 2,230,936 in 1980. Those numbers establish the scale of the borough, but they are not themselves Rav Moshe's formula for shishim ribo.

In IV:87 and IV:88, Rav Moshe asks how many residents of a dense city may reasonably be expected to be out in its streets during the ordinary part of the day. He also considers people who enter from outside the city for work, commerce, visits, and other regular purposes. He stresses the unusually dense housing of New York and Brooklyn, including large apartment buildings in which many families occupy a small ground area.

In IV:88 he records a city map from which, as he understood it, Brooklyn was approximately twelve mil by twelve mil and a little more. He then gives his factual estimate that close to three million people lived there permanently and close to another million entered for commerce, visiting relatives, and regular work. On that premise, he concluded that Brooklyn had far more than the relevant number in its streets and was a Torah-level reshus harabim.

The historical census total and Rav Moshe's estimate should therefore be kept distinct. The census gives a resident count. Rav Moshe was deciding a halachic question about public presence and public movement in the relevant urban area.

Public streets include the way a modern city actually moves

Rav Moshe also rejected several attempts to remove modern street users from the calculation. In V:28 he addresses the claim that people riding in cars should not count because the interior of a vehicle can itself have the status of a private domain. He responds that the vehicles are there to transport people and that the passengers are part of the public movement through the street.

Traffic regulation did not change that conclusion. Red lights, stop signs, and rules governing how vehicles move do not make the streets nonpublic. Rav Moshe's point is almost the reverse: such rules exist so that the public can travel through crowded streets in an orderly way.

Nor did he treat sidewalks as a separate, irrelevant strip. He writes that sidewalks are part of the reshus harabim itself because they are made for the public to walk on. Parked and moving cars likewise do not reduce a broad public street below its halachic width merely because they temporarily occupy part of the roadway.

The general halachos of street width, mefulash streets, openness, public passage, and the different understandings of shishim ribo require their own treatment. For Brooklyn, the important point is that Rav Moshe applied those principles to the normal realities of a modern American city rather than imagining a public street with no cars, sidewalks, traffic controls, or cross streets.

Flatbush and Boro Park were direct applications

Rav Moshe's two responsa in Orach Chaim IV:87 and IV:88 were written specifically in connection with Flatbush. He explains that he had originally declined to intervene when prominent Flatbush Rabbonim came to discuss an eruv because the underlying questions involved different shitos and the sources were available to qualified Rabbonim. When a report spread that he himself permitted the proposed eruv, however, he wrote to clarify his own view.

At the beginning of IV:88 he states it without ambiguity:

I have already explained orally the reason I hold that an eruv should not be made in Brooklyn, even in one part such as Flatbush.

Boro Park became the subject of another direct intervention. On 17 Teves 5739, in a letter on Union of Orthodox Rabbis stationery, Rav Moshe wrote that he joined the leading Rabbonim who held that an eruv could not be established in Brooklyn because it was a reshus harabim min haTorah. He concluded:

Therefore I warn that no eruv should be established in any neighborhood of Brooklyn, and it is forbidden to carry on the eruv that was made in Boro Park.

Later, in Orach Chaim V:28, Rav Moshe answered at length the arguments advanced in support of the Flatbush and Boro Park eruvin. That responsum addresses population, cars, traffic laws, sidewalks, possible surrounding walls, straight or aligned streets, and the practice of other large cities.

The collective rulings were also framed broadly

The same period produced collective public notices. A Union of Orthodox Rabbis proclamation dated Kislev 5739 restated an earlier position against establishing an eruv in New York and referred to the rulings of leading Rabbonim, including Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav Chaim Bick, Rav Yosef Eliyahu Henkin, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, and Rav Moshe Feinstein. Its operative language was not limited to a single Brooklyn block or one proposed set of poles and wires:

It is understood that the above prohibition includes every large city, and there is no distinction between Manhattan and another city.

The surviving reproduction lists sixteen printed names. Among them are Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Zalman Shimon Dworkin, identified as the Rav of Lubavitch. Because the available copy presents typeset names rather than visible individual autographs, the precise statement that can be made from this copy is that their names are printed on the proclamation.

A separate Kislev 5739 Hebrew notice carries a much larger list, approximately seventy-three names, and warns against establishing an eruv in New York or Brooklyn neighborhoods. Rav Moshe and Rav Dworkin again appear in the printed list. A surviving English newspaper notice gives substantially parallel public language and reproduces the names, but the surviving crop has not yet been matched to a complete newspaper issue, date, and page. Its exact newspaper provenance should therefore not be stated more specifically than the surviving evidence permits.

Crown Heights stands inside this Brooklyn record

Crown Heights was not named in Rav Moshe's Brooklyn responsa as a special enclave exempt from the borough-wide analysis. The public rulings of Kislev 5739 were worded in terms broad enough to include Brooklyn neighborhoods generally, and Rav Dworkin's name is printed among the Rabbonim on those materials.

Decades later, in Sivan 5776, the Crown Heights Rabbonim Rav Avraham Osdoba and Rav Shlomo Yehuda Halevi Segal expressly referred back to Rav Dworkin's Kislev 5739 ruling together with the other American and Canadian poskim, headed by Rav Moshe Feinstein. Their notice applies that history directly to Crown Heights and states that a halachically valid eruv cannot be established for the neighborhood.

That later Crown Heights ruling has its own local force and belongs with the full record of the Crown Heights Beis Din. The Brooklyn material explains an earlier layer beneath it: the poskim whose rulings are reproduced here addressed the status of Brooklyn itself as a densely populated public city, together with the details of any proposed boundary.